Standardization of intensity-values acquired by Time-of-Flight-cameras

Abstract

The intensity-images captured by time-of-flight (ToF)-cameras are biased in several ways. The values differ significantly, depending on the integration time set within the camera and on the distance of the scene. Whereas the integration time leads to an almost linear scaling of the whole image, the attenuation due to the distance is nonlinear, resulting in higher intensities for objects closer to the camera. The background regions that are farther away contain comparably low values, leading to a bad contrast within the image. Another effect is that some kind of specularity may be observed due to uncommon reflecting conditions at some points within the scene. These three effects lead to intensity images which exhibit significantly different values depending on the integration time of the camera and the distance to the scene, thus making parameterization of processing steps like edge-detection, segmentation, registration and threshold computation a tedious task. Additionally, outliers with exceptionally high values lead to insufficient visualization results and problems in processing. In this work we propose scaling techniques which generate images whose intensities are independent of the integration time of the camera and the measured distance. Furthermore, a simple approach for reducing specularity effects is introduced.